Visual Coercion

Ted Leo, Henry Art Gallery Seattle, WA Versus Atlas Sound MHOW 10/21 Kurt Vile and the Violators Kurt Vile and the Violators, upright. Yet another of Broadcast's set

Top Records of 2008

I have no further information about this band and I kind of like it that way, but if I had to give them a one-sentence summation, it would probably be something like: Having nothing to do with the army that fought on behalf of the United Kingdom in WWI and WWII, and neither carrying any formal associations with the other famous BEF, Human Leaguers’ Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh’s early ’80s electronic music outfit British Electronic Foundation that later became Heaven 17, Erased Tapes Records’ The British Expeditionary force are softly tearing the world a fantastic new asshole through which to waft the otherdimensional winds bands like Múm and Schneider TM sailed in on in the early part of this decade…. I wrote a long, confused metaphor a few issues back in Heso about how exciting I thought this record was, a metaphor that involved erotic weather patterns on the isle of Lesbos, but I think I will just say that this record stands out by being really different in its staccato bursts of rhythm from the nu-folk and boojie ivy league naptime garbage that people are shitting themselves for these days (I’m talking about vapid garbage like Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend, maybe even Bon Iver?- full disclosure).

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In From the Other Room: Tuning Darkly, Brightly

Sharing this passion for the haunting of 3-dimensional aural spaces with Plaid, The Black Dog delivers a very synthetic set of melodies minimally framed by a post-rave aesthetic that still sounds pleasingly and eerily natural. All the various wind-up monsters of sequenced repetition or LFO modulated pulses roaming the scales of this songlist in their terrific chrome and black matte definition, even at the full distance of hearing’s horizon, seem to do so obfuscated in a shadowy and endless nighted wood.

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